


Breaking Light

by vanitashaze



Series: Alabanza [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ADHD Lance, Alien Gender/Sexuality, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Canon Disabled Character, Cuban Lance, Future Fic, Galra Keith, Gen, Gender Issues, Kid Fic, M/M, Neuroatypicals in Space, Trans Male Character, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 05:43:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11052531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitashaze/pseuds/vanitashaze
Summary: “Maze stays silent for a moment and then asks in a rush:“Hunk also said that most human males don’t gestate infants, unless they’re like you. Are you a higher rank than everyone else? Did you get breeding privileges because you’re a paladin? Why didn’t Shiro get breeding privileges, too? Is it because he’s defective?”After Shiro and Allura announce their baby plans, Lance and his daughter have the birds and the bees talk. And the gender talk. And the disability talk. And then the birds and the bees talk again.





	Breaking Light

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for content warnings. People asked about Lance and Maze's relationship down the line, so: here you go.

 

_You, the guest of honor in your own skin.  
_ _Your heart: the law you will break over and over to let the light in.  
_ _Your body, not theirs. Your spirit, not theirs. Yours.  
_ _Your life, your fury, your compass, your steel floating in the water,  
_ _your water to break in the streets._

— Andrew Gibson, “A Genderful Pep Talk for My Younger Self”

 

 

 

The happy couple wait until all the paladins are in the Castle at the same time to break the news, which they do in a suitably dramatic fashion, hand in hand, both smiling as bright as the sun rising at their backs.

 

“What, now?!” Keith demands.

 

“Wait, did you do it on purpose?” Lance asks, at the same time. “Was it an accident? Oh my god, did it happen _again_?”

 

“No, not _now_ ,” Allura says, while everyone mentally unsticks themselves from the ceiling and Shiro looks suitably embarrassed for freaking them all out with his bad phrasing. “We’re not having a baby, we’re _planning_ to have a baby.”

 

She smiles at Shiro, and he smiles back, helpless with love. “But soon.”

 

“Hope you’re ready to go through the pregnancy sideshow again,” Lance whispers to Pidge. “Crying. Cravings. _Childbirth._ ”

 

“You’re not going to grow it in a vat, are you?” Pidge asks Allura hopefully.

 

“Nope!” Allura says cheerfully. “Old fashioned way. Lots of sex!”

 

“That’s really great, guys,” Hunk says. “You’re gonna be awesome parents, and we’ll all be here to help, like we were the first time around. And the second time. But, uh, speaking of the second time, has anyone seen Maze? I think I’m supposed to be on god-dad duty right now.”

 

“You’re damn right you are,” Lance tells him. “You’d better not have lost my child, you heartless monster.”

 

“Ignore him. She’s coloring in the window room,” Keith informs Hunk, who claps Shiro on the shoulder and gives Allura a thumbs-up before heading off to find Maze.

 

Pidge mutters some excuse and slips off, looking particularly hunted, and Coran rushes over to have a loud and excitable conversation in Altean with Allura, presumably congratulating her on her plans to further the species. Keith tries to escape too, but Shiro cuts him off.

 

“Do you have any… advice?” Shiro asks Keith awkwardly.

 

“Uh,” Keith says.

 

“Well, I do: Enjoy sex and sleep while you still can,” Lance tells Shiro, when it looks like that’s all that they’re going to get out of Keith. “Speaking of which, Hunk’s got Maze, why don’t you find Xio and go practice your dad thing while Keith and I do one of those s-words, still not sure which.”

 

Sex, it turns out, although it’s a pretty close call given how whacked-out Keith’s internal clock is after a week-long mission on a 27-varga planet. After two years of patience and non-judgement and a whole fucking lot of Frog and Toad, Maze’s sleep schedule has gotten to be mostly stable, and Lance is way less worried that either he or Keith are one step away from death by exhaustion, but Xio still runs them ragged on the regular, and they’re defenders of the universe, albeit one that’s gotten a lot less full of imperialist overlords than it was when they were seventeen.

 

It’s also possible that Lance doesn’t have quite the energy that he used to, but that’s something he’s trying hard not to think about, because it brings to mind words like “retirement” that he’s not sure he’s ready to hear yet, and Keith even less. They’re going to have to retire eventually, Lance knows, and he’s determined to put to rest any notions Keith might have about meeting his death at his cockpit controls, but — not now. Not yet.

 

It’s nice to have time together again, though, Lance thinks as he holds onto the headboard for dear life and tries not to scream so loudly they hear him down planetside. Retirement would mean more time for sex. Maybe he should give that more weight.

 

“Do you have any ideas for gifts for Shiro and Allura?” he asks Keith afterwards.

 

Keith thinks for a moment as they search through the bedding and try to puzzle out whose clothes are whose. “Knife?” he suggests. “Always useful. Uh. Boots? Shiro got stuck in a hole last week and now the sole is coming off of one.”

 

“No, a baby gift,” Lance says. Keith shrugs helplessly.

 

“They can buy everything they need, or the Castle can make it, or they can use Xio’s baby stuff,” Keith says, and tosses Lance’s underwear at him, nearly hitting Lance in the face. “Sorry, I’m not very good at gift-giving.”

 

“Oh, I know,” Lance says. “Pidge ratted you out. I know Hunk’s been buying my birthday presents for _years_.”

 

“Yeah, but I went to him for help in the first place, so I was being thoughtful,” Keith says, which for some weird reason makes sense in his head, and Hunk really does pick out some nice stuff, so Lance lets it go, distracted by the fact that it’s been a while since he’s seen either of their children so they’re due for a visitation, and both of them are still pretty fucking naked.

 

“Ugh, where are any of my clothes,” Lance mutters, pawing through the bedcovers. “Why didn’t we turn on the light?”

 

“Ambiance,” Keith says.

 

“Laziness,” Lance counters.

 

“Night vision,” Keith says.

 

“Yeah, for _you_ ,” Lance says. “Some of us don’t have fancy Galra eyes — don’t say it!” but Keith has already gotten out, “ _Contacts_ , Lance,” and now looks pretty smug, or at least what Lance can see of him, anyway.

 

“I don’t need contacts,” Lance says grumpily.

 

“You already have reading glasses, what’s the big deal?” Keith argues.

 

“Those are just for when my eyes are tired,” Lance says.

 

Keith snorts.

 

“Well, then,” he says, “I guess your eyes are tired all the time, because you can’t see _shit_.”

 

“It’s different,” Lance tries to explain. “Look, I hit forty, I’ll get glasses or contacts or whatever, okay?”

 

“You’re not going to hit forty if you crash Blue into an asteroid,” Keith grouches. “Get LASIK or whatever, I don’t care, I just want you to be safe,” which makes Lance pause and then lean over to kiss him, hand cupping Keith’s jaw, because he hadn’t realized that Keith was that worried for him, and maybe Keith hadn’t either.

 

“I’ll look into it,” Lance grudgingly concedes, which probably means that he’ll do it. Fuck. “Is that your shirt or mine?”

 

“Pretty sure it’s yours,” Keith says. “I don’t own anything in this color.”

 

“What, not red or black?” Lance asks, but yeah, it’s true that Keith’s not big on pepto-bismol pink, so that belongs to Lance. “What’s on the docket today?”

 

“You’re free. Xio’s got planetside social time, and I guess it’s my turn to supervise, you did it the whole time I was on mission. Allura said she’d be down there too, but she’s probably gonna be too distracted by Princess stuff to pay enough attention to Xio,” Keith says. “I really wish Xio’s new thing wasn’t climbing tall stuff.”

 

“Shiro never, ever should have taken her rock climbing,” Lance agrees. “Trust me, I’m going to make him pay for that one.”

 

He sighs. “I do think he’s going to be a good dad, though, even if he still doesn’t really understand kids.”

 

“He’s getting a lot of practice,” Keith says. “Allura too. And she’s got her shit together. I trust her.”

 

Lance _dearly_ wants to point out the irony in that statement, but irony, like gossip, just whizzes right over Keith’s head, and Lance isn’t going to mess with him in a way Keith doesn’t understand just to be a dick about something that happened over a decade ago.

 

“Go supervise our unholy spawn,” Lance says instead, giving him another quick kiss before making a shooing motion in the direction of the door.

 

“She’s not unholy, she’s just illegitimate,” Keith says, but he goes.

 

Lance flops back down on the bed after Keith leaves, giving himself a moment to bask in the blissful summer sea haze of Keith Kogane’s absolute _dedication_ to giving his boyfriend orgasms, then gets up, pulls on his bright pink shirt, and grabs his nail polish caddy, because according to the schedule he has free time right now, and that means that Lance has Plans.

 

The shirt is a new thing. Well, not the shirt itself — it’s got moth holes at the bottom and Lance has a vague memory of stealing it from Allura — but the so-vivid-you-blink pink, part of an increasing parade of brighter colors that have crept into Lance’s life and onto his bedroom floor over the years since Xio was born.

 

He dresses a little more femme these days, in the way that makes Pidge bounce their eyebrows at him occasionally, but Lance is pretty sure that he’s not going to be joining the Nonbinary Army any time soon. He’s a man; he’s just experimenting with being a different kind of man than his dad, or his uncles, or Keith. Only this time Lance is doing it in a way that everyone can see at a glance, instead of by himself in front of the mirror, or in front of the chemical dispensary machine in the medical wing, nudging his body chemistry into something that felt more like home.

 

It’s not a radical transformation or anything; he hasn’t made a commitment to dressing like someone pureed Carnival and then poured it all over his head. He really does like olive green, and going back on his meds after Xio was born dropped that baby weight fast, so he can still fit in most of the stuff he used to wear.

 

(Keith is still pissed about that — Lance still wears the army jacket he had at seventeen, although Maze has mostly claimed it as hers now, whereas Keith had to give up his beloved red jacket after he bounced up a good three inches and twenty, thirty pounds of muscle in his early twenties when Hunk banned the goop and Keith actually started _eating_.)

 

But Lance also doesn’t mind so much when his kids take his old stuff to wear or tear up or eat or whatever they do with it, although he’s had to teach them to ask before they start rifling through his drawers, Maze especially. Xio is picky about tags and textures and usually wants her own stuff rather than someone else’s; given the opportunity, Maze will rob him blind— did, in fact, once steal enough of his old clothes to make herself a nest, which she also hid perishable food in. That had been a fun discovery.

 

Other than the jacket thing, Keith really doesn’t seem to care what Lance says or does or wears, which Lance tries to find validating instead of annoying. It’s nice to have a partner who finds him just as desirable when he’s making an effort as when he’s unshaven and unshowered and wearing pajama pants with a giant hole in the left leg because Maze took a pair of scissors to them when she got mad at him last week — but if Lance ever does anything special, he’s doing it for himself, which makes it… harder, in some ways. It’s on him. It’s always his choice.

 

Having a boyfriend who identifies himself as gay instead of queer or homoflexible or whatever the kids are calling themselves these days — “Wow, way to sound like a dick _and_ an old fart,” Pidge had said when Lance tried to explain this to them, once — has always been a nice little bump to Lance’s self-esteem, especially way back at the beginning. He tries hard not to be weird or smug about it, because that’s not at all why he loves Keith, why he’s decided to make a family and a life with this guy, and anyway it’s not like, Aha! I caught one!

 

But it makes Lance nervous, too. Always has and still does, as much as he tries to stomp it out; scared to cross some previously unseen line and watch that switch flip in Keith’s brain from “male” to “female” the way Keith’s brain works on most things — “not-mine” and “mine”, “happy” and “unhappy”, “friend” and “enemy”.

 

Lance knows that it’s completely stupid, given that a) Keith has seen Lance naked, a lot, and his reaction isn’t _Ew_ , but _Yum_ , and b) Lance actually _got pregnant_ and _gave birth_ , which is supposed to be the epitome of womanhood or whatever the fuck, and Keith’s reason for briefly ditching him during that whole debacle was that Keith was an orphan with no social skills or parental role models, not that pregnancy had caused him to realize that his friend/rival/partner/maybe-sorta-boyfriend was too female for him to want anymore.

 

(“Boyfriend,” Keith had announced firmly when he cornered Lance in the common room, six months after Xio was born, their daughter squirming grumpily in his arms. “Not maybe-sorta. I figured it out,” and Lance had laughed and kissed him, because that was such a Keith way to say it, and yes. Yes.)

 

But bodies are one thing; how you dress them up are another.

 

When he was little, if Lance begged and pleaded and generally pestered until she threw up her hands and said fine, just shut up about it already!, his cousin Yulia would paint his nails for him with the precious polish another cousin had sent back to Cuba. His brain doesn’t hold on to a lot of things, but he still vividly remembers those afternoons, kicking his feet and trying not to squirm too much as she held his hand in her too-tight grip and turned him into something beautiful, one stroke of the brush at a time; remembers her holding his hands flat down on the table afterwards while the polish dried and telling him, _Hey, tonta, if you mess up my work and waste this, I’ll put rocks in your pillow for the next ten years, I swear_ , but letting him twitch and bounce and finally flat-out beat his feet against the floor anyway.

 

Keith has never actually said it outright, but Lance knows from some of the comments he’s dropped over the years that when he was really young, Keith actually thought he would die before he turned eighteen, because he’d never seen any adults like himself, only the other kids in his classes. And then he got mainstreamed and learned to build a shell around himself, to survive as something small and vulnerable curled up somewhere in his anger, but maybe he never really believed that he had something as strange as a future, because Lance still catches him staring at their teammates or their kids or even Lance himself sometimes with a confusion deeper and more profound than the usual Keith-doesn’t-understand-people-frown, like a sleepwalker waking from a dream and wondering how the hell they got _here_ of all places.

 

All sorts of brain weirds run in Lance’s family, and he saw plenty of them, growing up. He was odd, sure, and drove his family batty with plenty of the things he did, but he was an Espinosa and a McKlane, one link in an endless iron chain of generations, and he would be an Espinosa and a McKlane until the day he died, old and wrinkly and probably embarrassing his grandkids with all the things that just sort of plopped out of his mouth. He still feels a certain kinship with Keith in those moments, though, because sometimes Lance looks around and wonders the same thing, as the man who remembers being a little girl in Varadero, tracing star-maps with his shiny red nails and trying to fit the mess of feelings and desires in his head into shapes as clear as the constellations above his house.

 

Lance never would have dared at the Garrison, or back in Varadero after he came out. But years later, when one of the diplomats they were hobnobbing with caught him admiring her nails and told him where to buy the color she was wearing, he thought, _fuck it, I’m a galaxy away from home_ , and wrote down the address.

 

He didn’t show anyone that day, hands stuffed in his pockets as soon as the stuff had dried, nervous when he came to Keith’s room that night. Keith yelled at him to come in and Lance nearly took a header tripping over Keith’s bayard, so he was laughing when he came to his boyfriend’s bed, reaching for Keith with the silver polish on his nails glinting like starlight, and then Keith shoved him off, looking totally repulsed, and oh. There was the line. For some stupid reason, some part of him had thought that they wouldn’t have one, but there it was, writ in the disgust all over his boyfriend’s face, and Lance was busy cursing himself for a fool when Keith clapped both hands over his nose and demanded, slightly muffed, “You smell _horrible_ , what _is_ that?!”

 

“Um. Nail polish?” Lance offered, his voice only wobbling a little bit.

 

“Okay, the bad smell is gone, I found nail polish remover,” he shouted through the closed bathroom door five dobash later.

 

Keith stuck his head in and then immediately slammed the door shut again.

 

“That stuff smells _worse_!” he howled.

 

These days, Lance has a nice little collection of non-toxic, biodegradable, galactic-fair-trade — and most importantly, grudgingly-Keith-approved — nail polishes that aren’t quite as vivid as the colors he grew up with, but also don’t make his boyfriend have to leave the room whenever Lance wears them, although Keith still banishes Lance to do his nails in the communal kitchen with the fan on instead of anywhere near their suites.

 

It’s become a sort of ritual thing for Lance, a little present he can give himself to offset whatever’s stressing him out that week. (And he’s got plenty of stress — he’s a paladin and a father of two and the boyfriend of Keith Kogane, and some days Lance couldn’t tell you which of those is harder.) Since no one else on the Castle but Allura wears nail polish, it’s also some time to himself, a little bubble of solitude outside the hustle and clamor of his daily life.

 

That probably sounds great to someone like Keith, who still talks fondly more than a decade later about the months that he spent living by himself in a cave in the middle of the desert, but for Lance, the solitude is the worst part. Even after becoming a father — which is even better than fighting in a war at sucking up every spare moment from your life — Lance is a still rabidly social animal, and he never wants to be alone. Alone is _boring_.

 

Lance had offered to do Xio’s nails once. She’d accepted, managed to keep the right parts of herself still long enough for him to finish, and then she’d examined her nails and promptly announced that they looked “weird and wrong”, so thanks, kid, and that had been that father-daughter bonding dream squashed.

 

At least the repetitive physicality of it is enough to keep Lance soothed and occupied, even if he’s doing it on his own. It’s almost like knitting: a thin layer on one hand, then the other, then another layer, then the other, then another layer, then the other, back and forth, up and down the line, watching the color slowly build up over time —

 

And then drying period, which sucked when he was a kid and still sucks as an adult. It used to be that when he’d finish painting them, he had to flap and stomp and practically run laps around the Castle to stop himself from using his hands for things until they were dry, but eventually Hunk got tired of Lance thundering past his door at four in the morning and built him a little rapid drying machine.

 

Xio is off having planetside social time with Keith and Allura — or more accurately, Keith is busy lurking somewhere he can watch Xio and still not have to talk to anyone while Allura lets children hang off her ridiculously muscled arms and Xio ropes everyone else into her very detailed, very scientifically accurate balmera game — but as far as Lance was aware, Hunk had settled Maze down for her usual afternoon nap after she finished her coloring, so he’s surprised when she sidles into the kitchen as he’s getting out his nail stuff.

 

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, and she nods and limps over to the counter to lean on it for support.

 

“Your back?” he asks, but she shakes her head.

 

“No, I just couldn’t sleep,” she explains.

 

He raises an eyebrow and says, “So you gave Hunk the slip,” and she nods and smiles at him a little.

 

“He’s easy to hide from,” she says.

 

“Poor guy is too trusting,” Lance agrees. “Thinks that kids actually listen to them when you tell them to stay put.”

 

She snorts. “Xio never stays put.”

 

“See, he knows that, so he expects her to take off the second he turns his back,” Lance says, “but you’re sneakier. You wait. You _scheme._ ”

 

“I do,” she says, proudly.

 

She watches him for a moment and then asks, “Will your nail stuff stick to my claws?”

 

“Probably not the retractable parts,” Lance says, pleasantly surprised, “but the exposed parts, sure, maybe. We can try. And hey, if it comes off, you don’t have to worry about it getting in your food or anything, it’s non-toxic. Xio drank a whole bottle when she was four and she was fine.”

 

Maze makes a face as she clambers up into her booster seat to sit at the table with him. It took a whole year but she’s started growing again, like her body was waiting until it knew it was somewhere safe, the way a plant waits inside a seed. She’s still small, though, and probably always will be, malnutrition and trauma and deliberate medical intervention loading that particular die throw, although Lance wouldn’t use the word “medical” to describe anything that happened to her, no matter what those druids thought they were doing.

 

“Why did Xio drink nail stuff?” she asks, lip curling far enough back to show her fangs. Lance shrugs.

 

“Why do four-year-olds do anything,” he says. “As far as I can tell, because it was there.”

 

Maze rolls her eyes with all the scorn an eight-year-old can muster. Because it’s Maze, this is a lot.

 

“ _Xio_ ,” she says, like that explains anything, although it sort of does, but Lance tries not to encourage conflict between his children, so instead of rolling his eyes right alongside Maze at Xio’s latest antics — climbing Red! and then trying to jump off! — he grabs two huge handfuls of nail polish bottles out of the caddy next to him and dumps them on the table in front of her.

 

“Which color do you want?” he asks.

 

She picks through them carefully and finally settles on a shimmering grey/gold that clashes something awful with her fur, not that Lance is going to tell her that.

 

“Do you want to do them yourself?” he asks, but she shakes her head.

 

“Can you do it?” she asks him, hesitantly. “My hands are really shaky today.”

 

He uncaps the bottle and reaches out for her hand, which she settles into his with only a little bit of hesitation, nervously popping her claws out to their full length and then retracting them to normal.

 

“It’s not gonna hurt,” he assures her. “It’s just paint. Do you have any open cuts near your claws? Those sting if you get this in them.”

 

“No cuts,” she says, her eyes still fixed on her hand in his. He can feel the shakiness she was talking about now, the tremors that she’s self-conscious about and still tries to hide, even though everyone on the Castle has happily made Maze-shaped changes in their home, spoons and pens and chairs and door grips, aids for a child whose body is already starting to fall apart, little by little, even as she grows taller and stronger and more beloved. Lance makes a mental note to check with her physical therapist about whether they’re doing any grip stuff, and then has to drop her hand and take out his tablet to write it down so that it’ll actually happen.

 

Maze is used to it, by now — Lance dropping whatever he’s in the middle of to write something down on the mini-tablet he keeps clipped to his belt — so she just shrugs off his apology and waits patiently for him to be done. Fatherhood hasn’t made his executive functioning any better, but it’s sure demanded more from it, and he and Keith have both had to work out systems to ensure that their children actually get things like clean laundry and immunizations and birthdays.

 

Lance has a mini-tablet that hooks up one of the Castle’s somewhat pissier AIs. Keith, bless him, has a printer, a bulletin board, and string.

 

“Hey, you got anything coming up that you want me to remember?” Lance asks her. “I’ve got my external brain out, now’s the time.”

 

“You forgot Shay’s hatching-day last week,” Maze tells him.

 

“Wow, kid. Thanks for telling me that now,” Lance says sourly, but it’s gotten easier to spot Maze Tests, and this is definitely one of them. “Did you know her hatching-day was coming up?”

 

“Yes,” she says, and pretends to examine her claws for cuts or dirt or something.

 

“And you didn’t tell me because…?”

 

She shrugs. “I thought you’d remember.”

 

It’s a lie, and they both know it — one of those vulnerable places she waits and watches for in all of them and then sticks them in to see how they’ll respond. It’s mean, and manipulative, and Lance isn’t super fond of getting gaslit by his own kid or watching her do it to anyone else, but as their counselor says, it’s just part of the process of Operation Maze — convincing her that they really do love her and won’t hurt her or get rid of her if she does the wrong thing, and putting up with this bullshit in the meantime.

 

Getting pissed at her will only prove her fears about them right, so Lance just says, gently but firmly, “Next time, assume I won’t remember and tell me, okay? Shay’s my friend, I don’t want her to feel like people forgot her or don’t like her anymore.”

 

Because Lance is also a teeny bit manipulative, this seems to hit home, and Maze looks a little guilty when she says, “Okay, I will.”

 

“Did you send her a present?” Lance asks as he picks up the nail polish bottle again and reaches for her hand.

 

“Hunk said that Balmerans don’t give presents on hatching-days,” Maze says, examining him with keen-eyed interest as he starts on her left hand. “He said that hatching-days aren’t a celebration for the person who hatched, it’s for their parents, because making eggs is hard.”

 

“Amen to that,” Lance says, moving to the next claw. “Oh look, it’s sticking!”

 

“Hunk said other stuff,” she says, cautiously.

 

“What other stuff did Hunk say?” Lance asks absently, focusing on getting as even a coat as he can around the entire width of her claws — three-dimensional canvas, argh, probably going to have to let the top dry and then figure out a way to paint from the bottom, too — and she stays silent for a moment and then asks in a rush:

 

“Hunk also said that most human males don’t gestate infants, unless they’re like you. Are you a higher rank than everyone else? Did you get breeding privileges because you’re a paladin? Why didn’t Shiro get breeding privileges, too? Is it because he’s defective?”

 

Lance freezes mid-stroke, a blob of nail polish dripping from the brush onto the table.

 

“…Breeding privileges?” he asks.

 

“She let you have Xio,” Maze says.

 

“Who let me?” Lance asks.

 

“The Princess,” Maze says.

 

“Maze, I can assure you that Allura had absolutely nothing to do with how Xio got made,” Lance says, but that just makes her look confused.

 

“She let you breed with Keith and make Xio, but not Shiro, he still hasn’t bred. He’s the Black Paladin, he outranks you and he’s better stock, is it because he’s defective?”

 

Lance blinks at her, then puts the brush down back into the bottle.

 

“So I think what we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” he says.

 

“No, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you for asking,” he hurries to add when Maze starts to curl in on herself, the tremors in her hands becoming more pronounced. They’re going to have to repaint that hand, he thinks; she’s smearing it all over. “I just don’t understand.”

 

“You grew Xio in you,” Maze says. “Humans grow their babies in their bodies, that’s what Hunk told me, but Shiro hasn’t grown anyone, and he’s better stock. He should have been first.”

 

“What do you mean he’s better stock?” Lance asks.

 

“He’s stronger than you,” Maze says, matter-of-factly. “Faster, bigger, more agile. And he remembers things like hatching-days and needing to take laundry out of the washer.”

 

“Did I forget laundry in the washer?” Lance asks. She nods.

 

“But he doesn’t have an arm and he has shouting dreams and sometimes he forgets where he is,” she adds, “like I do. So he’s defective. And that’s why the Princess had you bred and not him?”

 

“ _Had me bred?_ ” Lance sputters, and Maze looks at him like he’s being an idiot on purpose and says, “Xio, you bred and made Xio.”

 

“Well, yeah,” Lance says, “but no one _had_ me — I mean, actually, Xio wasn’t planned at all —”

 

“She wasn’t authorized?” Maze asks. “Then why did the Princess let her live?”

 

“Because Allura doesn’t go around killing babies?” Lance says, bewildered.

 

Maze digests this with a tiny frown, one of the Maze microexpressions Lance has learned to recognize and translate for Keith, who had looked at him like Lance had announced that Maze had just turned bright green the first time Lance had muttered to him that she was looking a little uncomfortable so maybe they should head back to the Castle. This one says she’s not sure that she approves of whatever’s happening, but she’s afraid to actually say that.

 

“The Princess doesn’t seem to care about discipline,” Maze finally offers, cautiously.

 

“Not when it comes to sex or babies,” Lance says, and then curses inwardly when she looks at him with a glint of curiosity in her eye at the unfamiliar word.

 

“Uh, never mind the sex stuff, we’ll get to that another day,” he tries, but he just knows that she’s going to go ask Xio after this, who’ll probably say something weird or completely inaccurate or balmera-specific, because Maze has decided that Xio is, like, her social equal that she can go to when she’s afraid of offending adults, even though Xio is a cheerfully unreliable source of information whose unique way of thinking about things usually just confuses Maze more. “Okay, fine. Sex is, like… an activity adults do together for fun, but sometimes, they do it to start the process of growing a baby.”

 

Or when they’re idiots who don’t talk to each other but have unprotected sex in the lion bay and accidentally start that process anyway, he thinks, but that’s a story for another day.

 

“So no one has done sex with Shiro,” she tries. “Because he’s defective.”

 

“No, Allura does sex with Shiro,” he blurts out, and then immediately wishes he could take that sentence back and bury it under about fifty layers of concrete. “Why do you keep saying—”

 

“But you grew a baby and Shiro hasn’t. So you’re… better stock?” she asks, looking extremely doubtful.

 

“Shiro can’t—” Lance physically shakes his head, like that will make any of this clearer, and it actually works, because he remembers something Maze said at the very beginning and how Hunk talks around Lance’s gender stuff to be Earth-polite. “What did Hunk say? Exactly.”

 

“Humans grow their babies inside their bodies,” Maze says. “And most human males can’t do that, but trans men like you can. What’s a trans men? Is that your rank?”

 

“It’s a gender,” Lance says. “Sort of. Male is a gender, trans is a kind of that.”

 

“What’s a gender?” Maze asks. “You mean rank?”

 

“No, not a rank, I mean, uh. It’s… the kind of person that you feel like you are, how you act and how people treat you.”

 

“Rank,” she insists.

 

“No, not rank. It’s not that one’s better than another, they’re all different but equal,” he fumbles out, and decides that he’ll leave gender inequality for another day. “And with my species, often — but not always — they’re related to what reproductive organs you have. Some people have organs that can grow a baby, like me, and other people don’t. Like Shiro.”

 

She stares at him in horror and pity.

 

“Did the druids _take Shiro’s organs_?” she whispers.

 

“What? No,” Lance says, but she says accusingly, “You just said Shiro didn’t have his organs!”

 

Please, God, don’t let Shiro hear the sound of his name and come running, Lance thinks.

 

“Please stop saying Shiro and organs,” Lance begs her. “No, I know, I said it first, but— Okay, I didn’t say Shiro lost his… ugh, his organs, I said that he didn’t have the same ones that I do.”

 

“If Shiro was born defective, why does he have such a high rank?” she demands. “Why is he the Black Paladin?”

 

“He wasn’t born defective,” Lance says, bewildered, but Maze flaps her hands in a gesture she must have picked up from Xio, exclaiming, “He’s missing his reproductive organs and you say he was _born_ like that! He can’t breed! He’s defective!”

 

“He can breed, of course he can breed,” Lance says, and then immediately wonders if Shiro can in fact breed. Have they checked? He’s been exposed to an awful lot of radiation. Maybe Lance should mention that to Allura before they all get too into the Shiro-and-Allura power baby idea. “He just can’t grow the baby.”

 

“Defective!” Maze insists.

 

“Why do you keep saying—”

 

All the adult Galra Lance has seen have been human-male-looking, and the Castle had translated Galran into male pronouns. He’d just assumed that Galra females were — well, who knows, somewhere else, the Galra were stupid enough about species purity that they might be stupid about gender, too, but… It’s not like he knows any Galra other than Keith, who’s a hybrid, or the occasional Blade of Marmora guy, who he’s definitely not asking about their baby bits any time soon, or Maze, and he’d just…

 

Well. He’d assumed.

 

Did Pidge even say why they were calling the Galra kid they brought back from the labs she? Or did they just plunk Maze down and say, “The tag on her pen said Meyzak”?

 

Oh great, Lance thinks. I think I accidentally Earth-gendered my alien child.

 

“Are all Galra born with the organs that let them grow babies?” Lance asks Maze.

 

“Yes!” she says. “Of course!”

 

“Humans aren’t,” he explains, and she stares at him for a good thirty ticks.

 

“But… you look like Galra,” she finally says.

 

“No, we really don’t,” Lance says. “Galra are all fuzzy or scaly, and purple or green. Keith looks like one type of Galra, your type, but that’s only because he is one. Half, anyway.”

 

“You’re the right shape,” she says.

 

“Maybe we look the same to you, but it sounds our insides are different,” Lance explains. “Alteans too, so our species all make babies differently. Alteans change their bodies and internal set-up depending on who they’re with and whether or not they want to grow the baby, I guess all Galrans are automatically set up to grow babies, and humans… Well, we’re either born with the reproductive organs to grow a baby or we have the other set of reproductive organs, but we can’t shapeshift, and you need both kinds to actually create a baby.”

 

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but he’s only one man who didn’t even finish high school. Someone else can figure out how to explain intersex variations and secondary sex characteristics and human genetics to an alien eight-year-old. Maybe Pidge. Definitely not Hunk.

 

She stares at him doubtfully, then abruptly sticks her left hand out, the one that he was halfway through painting. It’s all smeared now, polish matted into her fur, and he rummages through his nail polish caddy until he finds the bottle of remover and a rag and gently starts to work it out of her fur.

 

“On my planet, Earth… well, there are different cultures with different ways of looking at it, but the ones that Keith and I come from, we call the people who have the organs to grow babies ‘women’, and the people who have the other organs ‘men’, and when they’re young we call them ‘girls’ and ‘boys’.”

 

“Hunk called you a men,” she says, frowning. “But you grew Xio. Or did Keith grow Xio?”

 

“Man,” Lance corrects. “Men is multiple. No, I grew her. Remember, Hunk said trans man?”

 

She nods.

 

“So, in the places where Keith and I come from, being a man or a woman is partly about what reproductive organs you have, but it’s also what you feel like inside, how you look and dress and act, how people treat you. What you’re allowed to do. That’s gender — the feeling, not the organs. And sometimes, people feel like they should be a different gender than the one that people treated them as when they grew up, and they change their bodies — or don’t — to fit where they want to, and we call those people ‘trans’, trans men and trans women,” Lance says, and just hopes that he’s not confusing her even further. “So, me, I’m a man, but I’m a trans man, because I was born with the parts that I used to grow Xio in, okay? And Keith is also a man, but he’s not a trans man, so he doesn’t have the parts to grow a baby in. And other people, doesn’t matter which organs, they don’t feel that their genders are men or women, they feel like something else. Like Pidge does.”

 

“I know Earth gender sounds weird and complicated and stupid, but I promise I’m not lying,” Lance adds.

 

Maze considers him as he works the polish remover through the soft fur of her hand.

 

“Ranks are easier,” she says.

 

“I told you, we don’t have ranks,” Lance says.

 

“Everyone knows what to do,” she says. “Highest rank chooses the best stock to breed, and no defectives. Easier.”

 

“Well, we do it differently. And between you and me, Shiro and Allura are going to have a kid soon,” Lance tells her. “You’re not supposed to know yet, but I’m telling you because they’re pretty obvious, and this way you can remind me to get them a good baby gift.”

 

She snorts unhappily. “The Princess should breed. He shouldn’t.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“He’s defective,” she mutters down at the table. “They’re bad for the group. They make the group weaker.”

 

“Shiro’s not defective,” Lance says, and squeezes her now-clean hand. “You’re not defective either. Neither is Keith, or Xio, or me. We’re just… different than other people. In our brains, or our bodies, or both, and we do all sorts of awesome stuff. Like Shiro. He’s got a metal arm and a pretty messed-up head and he’s the Black Paladin of Voltron.”

 

He tries to catch her gaze without doing something as stupid as touching her face, but she ignores him, reaching for a bottle of red nail polish. She grabs it, but her hand jerks and spasms and the bottle goes spinning across the table, and she sobs once and then pulls back into herself, both hands fisted and then loose in her lap.

 

“Maze?” Lance asks. “Maze. Hey, Maze, you with me?”

 

But she’s gone, sunk down deep into whatever place she goes when it’s too much, so Lance gets up and digs her frozen ball out of the freezer, the bright blue squishy toy that she’s learned how to hold onto and feel the cold from until she comes back. He places it gently into her hands, and then busies himself with neatening the scattered nail polish and then lining them up by color so he doesn’t do anything as unproductive as cry, and eventually, he hears a sniffle and looks over to see Maze, still clutching her frozen ball but looking right at him.

 

“I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t be a paladin like Shiro, I can’t do _anything_.”

 

He wants to hug her. He wants to wrap her up in his arms and promise her that he’ll never let go, promise her that the world will never hurt her again, he wants to kick in the gates of Heaven himself and demand that they _give it back_ — the body that she should have had, one with no surgery scars, one that didn’t already wake her in the night with whimpering pain; the childhood that she should have had, one without that fucking blue squishy ball — but she hates hugs. And he can’t do any of that.

 

“Then you do what you can do,” Lance tells her. “And today we do nail polish.”

 

She sniffles again. He thinks she might go back under, but she clings to her ball even tighter as he sits beside her and keeps up a steady stream of meaningless gossip, first in English and then in Spanish, and eventually she calms down, her body losing some of that tension that he’s kicking the stuffing out of himself for not recognizing earlier.

 

He doesn’t say anything, though. Maybe some parents would make a deal out of it, try to force Maze back into the shape she would have been in a different lifetime, but Maze isn’t normal and never will be, none of them are normal, and telling her to stop just teaches her to hide. He and Keith try not to repeat the things that hurt them upon their children; they try to make a life for Xio and now Maze where no one ever has to hide. God, they try so hard.

 

“Do you want the red instead of the grey-gold?” Lance asks.

 

“Yes, please,” Maze whispers, and he waits until she reaches out for him to take up her hand and the nail polish and start again.

 

“We probably should have explained all this to you earlier,” he starts.

 

“It’s okay,” she says, but he shakes his head.

 

“Nah, we assumed and we shouldn’t have.”

 

“Because it makes an ass out of you and me,” Maze recites, softly, and Lance grins and nearly gives her finger guns before he remembers that he’s holding a brush full of nail polish.

 

“Exactly,” he agrees. “So, I’m sorry. We should have asked. We thought Galra were like humans, because Keith is kind of like a human, and Pidge told us you were a girl. But I’m not sure why they thought that and now I think they might have gotten confused.”

 

“Am I a girl?” Maze asks.

 

“Do you want to be?” Lance asks.

 

“Xio said I am,” Maze says. “But then she said that I didn’t have to be if I didn’t want to be, and she asked me if I wanted to be a girl or a boy or something else, but I didn’t know what any of those were and I got all mixed up. So I didn’t say anything and she got bored and stopped asking.”

 

“When did she ask you?” he asks, curious.

 

“When she started talking to me,” Maze explains, which was years ago, and Lance laughs a little internally. Of course she did. Classic Xio, who misses so much, and then sometimes cuts right through the bullshit to see what all of them can’t.

 

“Are you less mixed up now?” he asks Maze.

 

“Not really,” she admits, nervously.

 

“Hey, if you don’t want a gender, that’s cool too,” he says. “Some peoples have them, most humans do, I guess other peoples don’t, and you shouldn’t have to do something just because we do it.”

 

“It sounds important,” she says doubtfully. “You and Keith have one. And I think Xio has one?”

 

“It’s important to us,” Lance says. “But it doesn’t have to be important to you.”

 

She considers this.

 

“Do I have to decide now?” she asks.

 

“Nope,” he assures her. “Decide whenever. Or decide multiple times. Or don’t decide at all. It’s your choice. Just, you know, let us know if you want us to call you something different, or use he or they or whatever to talk about you instead of she.”

 

“She means I can do everything, right?” she asks.

 

“Yeah,” Lance says, “you can be anyone you want,” but she makes a confused face at that.

 

“But I don’t have to do anything special?” she stresses. “Shes and hes and theys can all do the same things?”

 

“Yep,” Lance says.

 

“And you don’t have ranks,” she says doubtfully.

 

“Not socially,” he says. “And no one gets to decide who gets to have babies and who doesn’t except the people making them.”

 

She harrumphs a little at that.

 

“So, kid, want a gender?” he asks. She thinks for a moment, then shrugs.

 

“I can be a she now,” she says.

 

“Okay,” Lance says. “And if you change your mind later, like I said, that’s cool too.”

 

He finishes her left hand and she gives him her right hand unbidden.

 

“Shiro and the Princess are really going to breed?” Maze asks.

 

“Yep,” he says. “Maybe not right away, but they’ve been talking. Shiro actually asked Keith for advice, it was hilarious.”

 

“Will the baby not have an arm, too?” she asks.

 

“Dunno,” he says carefully. “Probably not, but maybe. And if it does, that’s fine. It could get a tiny prosthetic to match Shiro’s, that’d be pretty sweet, right?” She scowls. “You’re still not down with Shiro having a kid, huh?”

 

“The Princess should choose someone else,” Maze informs him.

 

“Oh yeah? Who?”

 

“Hunk,” she says firmly. “He’s good.”

 

“Yeah, I don’t think Hunk is breeding any time soon,” Lance says. “Don’t get me wrong, tiny-Hunks would be great, but they’re not gonna happen unless he and Shay grow them in a vat or something.”

 

“Hunk doesn’t do sex,” Maze says.

 

“Did he tell you that?” Lance asks.

 

“Xio did,” Maze informs him.

 

Don’t even want to know, Lance thinks.

 

“Shiro’s gonna be a great dad,” he says instead. “Prosthetic arm and messed-up head and all. Hey, what do you think we should get them? Gotta start planning ahead of time.”

 

“A blanket,” Maze says, “like Xio’s and mine.”

 

“The ones I made for you guys?” Lance confirms. She nods. “Smart choice. But maybe a little less lumpy than Xio’s.”

 

“She likes it,” Maze says. “She says it’s interesting. And it has good textures.”

 

“Well, if it has good textures,” he says. “Are you gonna help me make the one for the Shiro-and-Allura kid?”

 

“I _can’t_ ,” she says, unhappily, because she can barely hold a pen with the special grip assist thing they got her, much less a knitting needle.

 

“Nah, see, you can help me plan what it’ll look like,” he says. “You’re good at that and I’m — well, not. You’ve seen Xio’s blanket.”

 

“So many stitch types,” Maze mutters.

 

“Yeah, I had to work off a pattern for yours,” Lance says. “But you can design this one and I’ll knit it and it can be a present from both of us, okay? Look, your claws are done.”

 

He shows her how to stick her hand in Hunk’s dryer thing and assures her when she recoils, “It’s not gonna burn you, it’s just a fan,” but when the timer goes off and she pulls her hands out, her fur looks like it’s gone through a wind tunnel about twenty times and they spend five dobash trying to get the tangles out, so Hunk may need to put together a Nail Polish Dryer 2.0, but that’s fine, he’ll enjoy the challenge and Lance will guilt him into it if he doesn’t. Maze can help. She’s got those pitiful eyes down pat.

 

He’s still trying to figure out how a fur-safe dryer would even _work_ when Maze taps him gently on the arm.

 

“Can you take your external brain out?” she asks. “I want to write color stuff down and your brain has the voice typing program.”

 

“Color stuff?” Lance asks. “Oh, the blanket? You want to start right now?”

 

Maze looks at him for a moment, considering, and then she grins, the biggest smile he’s seen from her yet, and points at one of the bottles of nail polish, a deep purple with winking hints of silver.

 

“Yes,” she says. “I have some ideas.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for ableism, internalized ableism, internalized transphobia, non-explicit references to past child abuse, a dissociative episode, and a discussion about something that's eugenics in everything but name.


End file.
